by Jacquelyn Thayer
For photographers of dance, the trick of creation comes in capturing the most active of arts in still form.
The challenge is the addiction for Bill Frederking, professor of photography at Chicago’s Columbia College, where he has taught since 1983. Frederking, not a dancer himself, first stepped into the field in 1989 as a favor to a friend in the college’s department of dance. She needed a photographer for dress rehearsals; he was game to learn.
“The first photographs I did were with available light, but then I really wasn’t happy with the quality of the light or the images, and it wasn’t very fun for me,” he said. “It wasn’t until I brought them into the studio and we worked together and making the pictures was kind of a collaboration. And it started to get interesting.”
Hubbard Street Dance, 1998. © William Frederking.
An interesting hobby became a long-term passion—though Frederking struck a needed balance with one lower-key pursuit.
“When I got sick of dealing with the logistics of dancers and having to schedule them and all that, I would go and make still life, where I didn’t have to interact with anyone,” he said with a laugh. “In photography for me, the key has always been the framing—where things are within the photograph, and so that’s clearly a really important aspect in dance photography. You’re looking for a moment, but it’s a visual moment, and it’s very different than the moments that happen in live performance, because some things look really beautiful when you see it live in movement, and then when you make a photograph of it, it’s just dead.”
As an outsider to the dance world, Frederking has found that his concerns often differ from those of his subjects and choreographers, whether working in his preferred studio space or live performance.
“I’m not proud of this fact, but it’s like a musician who can’t read music—I’ve never really learned the vocabulary of dance, and I particularly like to photograph modern dance more than ballet,” he said. “I have photographed ballet, but I found that the ballet companies that would hire me, they know exactly what they want, and they want that moment and if you don’t get that moment, they don’t like the picture.”
“I’m not bragging, but I’ve gotten good enough I can time a leap,” he continued. “I know how to photograph a leap and get that peak moment, but I’m actually from a photographer standpoint more interested in those other moments. I’m not a dancer, so I don’t think always about pointed toes or form in the same way they do. Not just ballet dancers—modern dancers who have a lot of technical training, there are certain shots that they’ll never use because their foot is limp, or something else. But there’s something else going on in the picture that I really like.”
Frederking, though, also knows that he’s unusual among dance photographers, with many themselves having a foundation in practice and performance. Fellow Chicagoland resident Kelly Stachura studied dance, focusing in styles including classical ballet, modern and jazz, for over two decades. As a high school student, time spent with the Orchesis Dance Company and in a photography class fostered a merged interest. “It seemed natural that the two would eventually overlap,” she said. “It’s thrilling to experience those moments when the right lighting conditions, choreography, dancer and emotion come together to create a single powerful image.”
© Kelly Stachura
Stachura believes her training in dance as well as gymnastics and related activities has borne fruit in her photographic work. “Being able to draw first-hand from those physical experiences and understand movement from the inside out allows me to bring an awareness of proper technique and form to the images I create,” she said. “Whether I am photographing young dancers or professionals, I am stressing correct form and constantly giving feedback to make sure the images are both accurately and visually beautiful.”
While she explored a variety of styles as a performer, as a photographer Stachura finds herself drawn most to modern and jazz. “The vocabularies of moment in both of these dance forms have the ability to create an infinite number of complex shapes as well as offer me the thrilling moments of capturing leaps, turns and jumps,” she said.
But photographing movement brings with it a fair number of special issues. While a photographer can control a studio setting, live performance often means dim lighting and typical dark marley flooring. “They look beautiful to an audience, but they’re nearly impossible to photograph,” said Frederking. “There’s so much contrast that you just don’t get a lot of. The lighting is very subtle and very beautiful on the dancers, but there’s just not enough of it, and then on top of it there’s a black floor.”
Stachura noted the active responses needed when handling performance light. “In one dance, there could be 10, 50 or over 100 lighting cues,” she said, each of which demands an appropriate adjustment to her camera’s color settings. “Every stage is different in the types of lighting used, how many lights are used, and where the lights are coming from, which means that roughly every square foot of the stage can potentially present a completely unique lighting condition. When photographing dancers covering a large stage, for example, that can mean that the lighting hitting one dancer can be drastically different than that falling on the dancer right next to him or her.”
And photographers of social dance—especially swing and blues—face their own set of challenges in that respect, noted David Holmes, a Houston-based swing dance photographer. Holmes began his endeavor in 2007, while accompanying his wife to her own performances.
“Since lighting is so important in photography and almost always of poor quality in venues, I don’t usually use the venue lighting,” he said. “My approach is generally to get a larger light source by bouncing on-camera flash off of a larger surface while also blocking any direct light from the dancers so as not to blind or distract them.”
2010 Lone Star Championships. © David Holmes
As with any field dealing in capturing motion, focus proves a typical concern—enough so to create lowered expectations for some.
“The first person I worked with—I don’t think she was trying to insult me or anything, but she just said ‘Oh, they’re in focus!’” said Frederking with a laugh. “I was hoping to hear a bit more than ‘They’re in focus!’ But they’re in space, so usually I have to focus on a point in space where the dancers aren’t and then the dancers, because of their spatial awareness, I usually give them a target on the floor, and if they’re going to jump, they have to be above that space.”
And handling multiple couples across a shared floor space is no simpler, as Holmes noted. “Social dance at a large event is difficult. It is tough to get an optimal camera-to-subject distance and to get unobstructed shots on a crowded dance floor,” he said.
Frederking and Holmes both likened the task to that of sports photography.
“You are trying to create a whole photograph—you’re not just trying to get that one isolated moment,” said Frederking. “You hope that everything that’s in the background is also cool, because if you’re a photographer, you want everything that’s in the frame to be right.”
And sometimes time itself is the most crucial of elements.
“When photographing dance, especially any fast-paced movement, there is no time to think and react to what is happening in front of you,” said Stachura. “You have to know what you are capturing and respond to the moment before it happens, often with never having seen a particular work ahead of time.”
While Stachura credits her background as improving her “sixth sense” about key moments, Frederking has found experience to be the primary teacher, a lesson he stresses for his students.
“I’m not a trained dancer, where a trained dancer can anticipate because they’re dancers and they know that somebody’s about to jump or something,” said Frederking. “They can respond to that. So I don’t do it based on knowing that in my body; I base my sense that something’s about to happen that I want to photograph on my twenty years of going to concerts and shooting dance.”
Especially, he added, shooting over 1,000 images for a performance only a few minutes in length. “The really disappointing thing about shooting live performance is I would love all those 1,700 to be beautiful, and they’re just not,” he said. “If I’m not looking to make every shot count, then why bother? Because I don’t know how I got that one picture. I don’t know exactly, but I chose to react at that moment, and it was a good moment to react.”
Links Hall dancers, 2014. © William Frederking
Aiding photographers in the quest to seize that moment is the advancement of visual technology, a progression Frederking has been well-positioned to observe. Reliance on film and its associated limitations has given way to the digital age, reshaping even a process as simple as establishing a subject’s position.
“If I’m working with a company and they’re trying to get a specific shot, I do that, and now that everything’s on the computer, they can look at the computer and see if we’re in the same ballpark,” he said. “What’s kind of interesting is I look at my old work, and those all just happened. I shot them, we did one Polaroid to get the basic lighting, basic position, I would show them to the dancers, and then we would just shoot film. They didn’t see the film for usually weeks.”
Difficulty, of course, exists outside of technical challenge. As with the dance it documents, financial security by the art alone is hard to come by. Stachura’s photography business handles a full spectrum of services, including wedding and family portraiture. Frederking, who before Columbia worked in commercial photography, currently shoots dance on a pro bono basis, relying on his teaching income.
“I’ve worked with Hubbard Street, and they had fairly big budgets. Even then, they never hired me more than twice a year. That’s why maintaining a studio is really hard,” said Frederking, who utilizes studio space at the college. “I worked with River North for years and they would do the same thing—they had bigger budgets for photography, but they only did a couple of shoots a year. When the bigger companies would come in, they were very specific, and because time was money and they really wanted to get something done—that’s part of the reason I don’t do that kind of work as much. I love those companies, I love their dancers, but it was hard without a full-time studio staff.”
For the photographer, the incentive lies in a different wealth, whether shooting professional modern dancers in performance or children at a first ballet recital.
“I think the commonality in all of these moments,” said Stachura, “is finding something deeper—finding those moments when the human element is there, and I can see a pure expression of emotion giving infinite depth to a physical form in space. Dance is about so much more than just movement, and my favorite moments are when I can bring out and share those underlying elements.”
And ultimately, it comes down to the thrill of a moment.
“I’ve been making photographs since 1978 when I was in college, and this is like the purest form of photography to me because it’s all about time,” said Frederking. “It’s there. There’s a split second that happens, and I either get it or I don’t.”
